Thursday, August 11, 2011

Cathie Black has finally made her stamp on NYC schools. Ms. Black famously asked, when presented with evidence of chronic and systematic overcrowding, why we couldn't have just a little more birth control. Now, it appears, Mayor4Life is making her idea a matter of law. We must have sex education classes in city schools, and that's pretty much it.

After all, with class sizes the highest in the state already, years of failure to reduce class sizes, and a history of taking hundreds of millions for class size reduction yet achieving the opposite, it's a tough row to hoe. So Mayor Blooomberg is taking the long-term view, from hoe to eternity if you will, and hoping that eventually this results in fewer students.

And if it does not, well, what's the dif? By the time our kids have kids, Mayor Mike will perhaps have abdicated and there'll be some other poor fool to take the rap. Even better, Mayor Mike could look at the whole situation and say, "It's those darn teachers. We asked them to teach kids not to have sex, and look, kids are having sex anyway." It's a win-win, in Tweedspeak.

So sure, Cathie Black didn't last. She was even more preposterous a figure than most of Mayor Mike's education people, and after a while not even the New York Post could pretend to take her seriously. Still, who would've thunk, all these months later, that her single most offensive piece of advice would be the one that drove the mayor, even all these months later?

Cathie Black has finally made her stamp on NYC schools. Ms. Black famously asked, when presented with evidence of chronic and systematic overcrowding, why we couldn't have just a little more birth control. Now, it appears, Mayor4Life is making her idea a matter of law. We must have sex education classes in city schools, and that's pretty much it.

After all, with class sizes the highest in the state already, years of failure to reduce class sizes, and a history of taking hundreds of millions for class size reduction yet achieving the opposite, it's a tough row to hoe. So Mayor Blooomberg is taking the long-term view, from hoe to eternity if you will, and hoping that eventually this results in fewer students.

And if it does not, well, what's the dif? By the time our kids have kids, Mayor Mike will perhaps have abdicated and there'll be some other poor fool to take the rap. Even better, Mayor Mike could look at the whole situation and say, "It's those darn teachers. We asked them to teach kids not to have sex, and look, kids are having sex anyway." It's a win-win, in Tweedspeak.

So sure, Cathie Black didn't last. She was even more preposterous a figure than most of Mayor Mike's education people, and after a while not even the New York Post could pretend to take her seriously. Still, who would've thunk, all these months later, that her single most offensive piece of advice would be the one that drove the mayor, even all these months later?

Top Secret Correspondence

Quoteworthy

At this point, the only reason left to support this President, is that he reflects your hateful heart; he shares your contempt of people of color, your hostility toward outsiders, your toxic misogyny, your ignorant bigotry, your feeling of supremacy.

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Views expressed herein are solely those of the author or authors, and do not reflect views of my employers, the United Federation of Teachers, or any UFT union caucus.

Stories herein containing unnamed or invented characters are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.